War On Terror: The U.S. now holds a prisoner of war who has knowledge that could foil future terrorist operations. The Obama administration has a moral obligation to extract it from Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

The White House seems very big on the idea that fear is our enemy, not our friend. When sheer luck prevented the destruction of Northwest flight 253, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano instantaneously insisted there was no larger conspiracy involved — even though the failed bomber himself said otherwise.

And for nearly a year now it has been official U.S. policy, from the commander in chief on down, to eschew wartime terminology. Forget “global war on terror” and substitute “overseas contingency operations.” Cut “terrorism,” paste in “man-made disasters.”

Quelling fears, however, isn’t the real purpose behind the altering of the U.S. government’s post-9/11 language. This is:

If the public stops believing the free world is in a protracted war with Islamofascist mass murderers, then the question of which party’s anti-terrorism policy is better loses all meaning. You can’t lose a non-war, any more than you can win one.

If Abdulmutallab is akin to the D.C. Sniper or the Son of Sam, then why turn him upside down in search of information? What’s the point in placing another David Berkowitz in a cold jail cell, or depriving a John Allen Muhammad clone of sleep so he’ll tell us what he knows?

Former Vice President Dick Cheney hit it on the head this week in charging that this administration is playing an inexcusable game of “Let’s Pretend.” If we close Guantanamo Bay and send terrorist POWs to some hamlet in Illinois, if we have ACLU-friendly judges try 9/11 conspirators in liberal New York City, then the American people will realize that the big-government sophisticates can take care of these problems.

The voters will come to see that this is a job for superlawyers, not those guys with the fruit salad on their uniforms and the twang in their voices, who commit faux pas like calling senators “ma’am.”

And should anything go wrong, the politicians in Washington don’t get the blame for losing a global war; it’s the fault of “the system” — like so much of the rest of the failures of big government, from paying farmers not to grow crops to your local DMV’s lack of customer satisfaction.

The ethos of those running this administration seems to be: Who wants to continue getting bogged down in this messy new kind of war when we have work to do purging ourselves of the injustice that causes the world to want to wage war against us?

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